


Trust

by kiddywonkus



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-10
Updated: 2013-04-10
Packaged: 2017-12-08 01:41:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/755516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiddywonkus/pseuds/kiddywonkus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur develops a new form of dream security, and taps Eames to test it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trust

            It was a weird phone call to get, but not anymore weird than Dom showing up in the middle of Mombasa knowing full well that he had a price on his head there. Eames had long ago accepted that which was weird to most people was actually normal when it came to the world of mind-heists, where paradoxical architecture and impromptu suicide were survival strategies.  When all was said and done, it was a weird phone call to get, nonetheless.

On the other line, though, Arthur hadn’t said much, he never did.  That much wasn’t weird. He just said that he needed to check a new form of subconscious security, and wondered if Eames was up to the challenge.

            Eames wasn’t so sure there was anything that could be a challenge anymore. He had gone three levels deep, and fought an army in the sub-zero temperatures and eight feet of snow under the very real threat of scrambling his brains. More importantly, he had survived Dom Cobb, something which he knew that even Arthur had trouble doing.

            To be frank, he wasn’t so sure Arthur had.

            And so it was that he sat down with Arthur in a quiet coffee shop in Istanbul, a game of backgammon sat between them, but the pieces still left in the opening play.

            “You haven’t even tried to negotiate a price,” Arthur said, relaxing back into the worn, red cushions, his right ankle hooked on his left knee. He was rolling the two dice in his hand.

            “It’s the challenge I’m more interested in, darling.” Eames leaned forward, pressing his fingers together at the tips. “But if we’re going to talk about price, how about I keep whatever I find in that head of yours?”

            For gamblers, wealth was fleeting. But information? That always paid.

            “What do you want to know?” Arthur asked, an eyebrow quirked.

            Eames didn’t move. Didn’t nod. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t give Arthur any rope to save or hang himself with.

            “Then do it the only way you know how. If you find it, you deserve it.” Arthur raised his eyebrows, and took another drink from his coffee. “Though, part of this is breaching my topside security too. I don’t know how you’re going to trick me into going under.”

            “I already have.” Eames couldn’t help but smirk.

            Arthur looked at his glass mug, and smiled drowsily. “What a merry chase this will be.”           

 

            * * *

Making a labyrinth in west Kansas was one of the most challenging things Eames had ever done, and he had pulled off inception in a heavily securitized mind three levels deep with only a psychologically disturbed man and a novice for help. There was nothing but bloody plains for miles, and trying to add rooms or ways out was not easy. But Eames, though not the greatest architect, had imagination.

            And a phone.

            Which he could use to call Ariadne.

            Which, he was not too proud to admit, he did.

            But mostly it was Eames’ imagination.

He had to create panels of blue sky to hide behind, and horizons that led in circles. He stashed guns in compartments on sides of hills one had to approach counter-clockwise in order to see, and created safe houses that he hid away over a horizon that was much closer than it looked.

If he was going to be honest, he was rather proud of it. At first glance, it didn’t look like a place where one person could take on an army of projections, but it was deceptive. He could vanish and appear in his giant labyrinth of sky, and find Arthur without a problem. He was showing off, really, bringing Arthur to this dreamscape.

            Now he only needed Arthur to show up and appreciate it.

But there was no one there, and he worried that maybe he hadn’t successfully knocked Arthur out. That maybe it was just Eames in Eames’ mind, but that was impossible. His own projections were missing. He dodged behind a panel of blue, disappeared into the sky, and waited. After all, another fifteen minutes here was negligible topside.

             He wondered that if Arthur was having him on; that topside, Arthur was awake, and writing on his face. Maybe putting his hand in lukewarm water. Probably not, but who knew what Arthur actually did to amuse himself when he was alone.

            Just as he began contemplating shooting himself, Arthur appeared, wearing a pair of old jeans and a green flannel shirt.  Eames watched Arthur do one full turn to survey the landscape before sitting down.

            Nervously, Eames looked around. Arthur hadn’t populated the dream with projections. It was just him, leaning on his elbows, with his legs sprawled out ahead of him and his eyes squinting as he stared at the sky.

            Eames was expecting farmers, maybe some childhood friends-- something in the vast emptiness that wasn’t just Arthur. He considered sacrificing some of his escape routes and pulling the town on the horizon closer just to force Arthur into making some projections, but he couldn’t risk Arthur noticing, and the bastard was sitting down; not even moving. He couldn’t even make it so it seemed like Arthur was walking there.

They couldn’t have been asleep for more than five minutes, and already Eames was already running into difficulties. He smirked. Trust Arthur to make this fun.

            So Eames waited, but no one came. The plains remained just as empty as reality and Arthur, just as alone.

            “Arthur,” Eames said, walking out from behind the blue sky. He could feel a touch of cloud sift through his dangling fingers. “When I say you lack imagination, I don’t actually mean it.”

            Arthur didn’t seem surprised by Eames’ sudden appearance. “I don’t see how making my childhood home is going to make me spill any secrets, Mr. Eames. Though, I’m surprised. How did you find out I was from Kansas?”

            “Your vowels,” Eames said simply, sitting next to him. “Not all of them, but a few every once in a blue moon. Like you forget to hide it.”

            “Do you know what it’s like to grow up in a country where you can’t hide?” asked Arthur, he squinted as he faced the sun. Eames wanted to say that he did, seeing as he had to dream up the place and it made it nearly impossible for him quick getaways. .

            “It certainly makes you more paranoid,” he said finally, standing up and holding out a hand to Arthur. “Let’s take a walk.” To his surprise, Arthur took his hand.

            The way Arthur moved had always been graceful, even as he pulls on Eames’ arm to right himself, even as he brushes the grass off the back of his legs.  It was obvious to Eames that Arthur had been working on one forge all his life, and he had perfected it.           

            Eames directed Arthur into a park on the edge of town, slowly creating an old jungle gym that was rusted from too many years out in the open, and a swing set with one broken seat that hung from one chain. The other was sun-bleached, and brittle.

            “I’m not paranoid, Eames.” Arthur, squatted down and toyed with a blade of grass. “Just cautious.”           

            Eames frowned, noting that even with the town, there weren’t any projections. “You know I’m just your projection of Eames. Right? It’s no good talking to me like I am. I didn’t make any of this.” He gestured at he plains, at the town Arthur had grown up in. “You did.”

            “Now this is an interesting gambit,” Arthur noted, picking at a piece of grass and rolling it between his fingers.

            “Is it?”

            “For this to work, you would have to become what _I_ think you are.”

            “And how am I doing so far?”

            Arthur smiled and shook his head. “I need a drink.”

            Without looking at Eames, Arthur headed towards a water spigot by a fence.

            “Don’t you have other projections?” Eames asked, if only because pushing his luck is what he was good at. Well, unless he’s at the craps table, but he hardly ever counted that. Why would he need to when he just forged chips anyway?

            “Why would I? This is true security.” Arthur lifted the handle, and cupped his hands beneath the faucet. Eames would have thought it sad that being alone is what Arthur thought safe was, but he couldn’t deny the logic of it.

            It was actually a good idea. Better, dare he say, than the gun toting ones he had been so used to in others’ minds. No projections meant interlopers were obvious. Arthur would simply realize he was dreaming, and know exactly who to target. “So, you don’t really believe I’m your projection.”

            “You could be.” Arthur shrugged. “I can’t discount it.”

            Then he took a sip of the water, looked at Eames and shook his head before he collapsed to the ground.

            * * *

            Eames went under to join Arthur on the second level, and found himself more dumbfounded than he was on the previous level.

            To anyone else, the dream populated with varying Arthurs of his self-conscious would be sure sign of narcissism, or lack of imagination. Eames recognized it for what it was.

            This was subconscious security in the fastidiously tedious way only Arthur could pull off, and he’d be damned if it wasn’t imaginative.

            At first, Eames didn’t believe it as he entered a bar filled with nothing but Arthur. Arthur in a black waistcoat. Arthur in a grey one. Arthur in just a blue-striped button-down. Arthur with a red tie. Arthur with a black one.

            “Oh Arthur, you’ve really outdone yourself this time,” he muttered to himself, but it was too loud. Instantly, the eyes of Arthur’s doppelgangers were on him. Prudently, Eames stepped out of the bar, rounded the building, and dodged down an alleyway where he dreamed up a broken mirror leaning up against the dumpster.

            He exhaled, and transformed himself into Arthur, letting the familiar sensation of his skin warping distract him from the fact that he had never been able to successfully forge Arthur, not that it ever mattered before. He had done it once, on a lark, to see if he could fool Dom Cobb. The bullet the man’s wife put between his eyes never answered his question.

            _Mrs. Cobb was lovely indeed_ , he snorted at the memory.

He wore his favorite outfit of Arthur’s, which was a blood-red shirt, and a pinstriped three-piece. Checking himself in the shattered pieces, he deemed the forge to be as quality as it could be and went back into the bar.

            Eames would have preferred something else from Arthur’s memory for the second level, but the man was impossible to research. So instead, he chose the first place they had met, where Arthur had offered him a job to steal military secrets from USA provided he was as good as he said he was. Eames made sure to keep his poker chip close at hand.

            “We look very similar, you and I,” he remarked as he sat down at the bar. He chose an Arthur who looked more relaxed; a yellow, short-sleeved blouse and a pair of crisply ironed brown slacks.

            The relaxed Arthur nodded.

            “Which one of us is the real Arthur?” Eames asked without any forward thinking. He already knew he lost on the first level, and he didn’t know why Arthur had let him take him down to the second. Besides, fast and loose was always the best way to win.

            “Depends on what you want,” said the relaxed Arthur evenly, turning his heavy gaze on Eames. It was one Eames was very used to. Eames just raised his eyebrows the way he remembered Arthur always did.

            “Cobb,” he said finally.

            The relaxed Arthur shrugged, but one behind him stood up abruptly, his chair making a loud noise against the floor. This Arthur was not so casual. He looked severe in all the ways Eames was used to seeing him on the job. All black, with every crease in its place. His eyes were hard, and his expression unforgiving.

            “What is Cobb to you?” demanded the black Arthur coldly.

            “You mean, what is Cobb to us?” Eames tried to keep his voice low and gruff, the way he had heard Arthur do in tense negotiations. He tried to lean against the bar casually. “We are the same person.”

            “No one questions Cobb. Not even me.” And then the black Arthur pulled out a gun and shot. It didn’t kill Eames at first, and he fell to the floor gagging on his own blood when the black Arthur walked up to him, pressed his gun against Eames’ left earlobe.

            He barely registered triggered being pulled.

            * * *

 

Eames awoke to find Arthur fluttering his eyelids as his awareness shifted to wakefulness. They were lying side by side on the field, and the breeze dances across Eames’ pink shirt and linen jacket. Eyelash grass brushed up against his lips as he lay there, unwilling to face this Arthur knowing he had lost.

After a while, he turned his head, sat up and stared at Arthur.

            “That wasn’t me,” Arthur said, slowly rousing himself. “Though that was more effective security than I had thought.”

            “Do you regularly shoot projections in your mind who ask questions about Cobb?”

            Arthur didn’t answer, but his steady gaze told Eames everything he wanted to know.

            “I will never understand you, Arthur.”

            “Do you ever wonder, Mr. Eames, if that’s because I prefer it that way?”

            Eames said nothing.

            “It’s funny how you purposely forget things in your past. Do you not remember who I was without the Cobbs?”

            Eames slipped his hand into his pocket and felt his poker chip. “You were a right pain in the arse.”

            “You say that about me now, too.” Arthur raised his eyebrows, and Eames wondered if he had done it right in the dream. There was something oddly ethereal in Arthur’s hardness, difficult to pin down, and tricky to forge.

            “I don't remember. Arthur, I know I’ll never believe you topside, but you have got to tell me. Why were you so loyal to Cobb? The man was off his rocker.”

            Arthur’s eyes went distant, and Eames followed them the sky. It was breaking away in pieces, and Eames knew he had been had. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

             “Then answer me this question. If I had asked about me, what would your projection have done?”

            “Shot you,” answered Arthur simply.

            Eames rubbed his eyes, and realized that in a strange way, he was somewhat comforted by that fact.

            Then he grasped his gun, and took it to his head.

            * * *

            “You are bloody crazy,” remarked Eames when Arthur joined him in the world of the awake. _Crazier than Cobb_ , he almost added.

            Arthur sat up and turned his eyes towards Eames, his gaze heavy with a meaning Eames didn’t quite understand, and said nothing.


End file.
